Title: Harry Potter and the Soul Rest Draught
Author: thebombhasbeenplanted
Rating: T
Genre: Mystery/Adventure
Status: Complete (22k words, 3 chapters)
Library Category: General
Pairings: Daphne/Harry (light)
Summary: Harry Potter's fated meeting with Lord Voldemort, long ago, left him without parents and a sleeping disorder. Thankfully, at the magical school of witchcraft and wizardry, Hogwarts, such a small disorder is easily fixed by the potion master.
Link: FanFiction.net

Brand new, shiny story that got completed last week-end. The author is likely known for his other story, "Too young to die" about a dark!crazy!necromancer!Harry that fell into all the tropes possible and imaginable of that genre.

But this one is completely different. It's light-hearted and whimsical, based around dreamscapes and an adventurous young Harry. I'm not sure whether the writing is good or bad, but you can tell the guy really tried, and I enjoyed reading it.
The plot and setting don't really go anywhere, there is resolution and closure at the end but it feels like there could have been so much more, just describing it would be spoiling the whole thing: it's only 3 chapters. The characters are nice and believably young for once (especially considering his other story that I re-read recently and is just ridiculous in that department).

I really liked it, and I can't find an actual flaw to it, so I'm going for 4.5/5. Missing half a point because it's just lacking some more meat to it.

 

Giant walls of text, unspaced paragraphs, dialogue within paragraphs, a complete lack of respect for beats and tags, and poor punctuation. Yeah, maybe once the author figures out how to write, I'll actually read the story. No score from me, but I would absolutely not recommend this whatsoever, on account of it being unreadable from a technical point of view.

 

So, I didn’t get through much and I don’t think I’ll be able to keep reading any further if the first chapter is any indication. Frankly, I can’t believe I made it past the “first episode.”

It’s supposed to read like a dream and it ends up almost incoherent. The absolute mess of run-on sentences, out of place punctuation, bizarre prose, and speaker-switching dialogue is almost impossible to understand.

Hell, the whole thing feels like it was taken from that bot-written piece that showed up in the humor mill. Except it isn’t funny.

1/5 get me out.

 

I immediately drop fics that don't break up dialogue and just toss it all into one big paragraph. It's such a pain in the ass to read and only tells me that the rest of piece of likely to be just as terrible. It's really not difficult at all to press Enter when you're done with someone speaking.

 

It's true that the text is dense as fuck and would benefit from being formatted. I didn't really have that much trouble with it though.

 

If you mean it’s a grammatical mess and the author needs to learn that shit writing isn’t a stylistic choice, sure. The sad part is their previous work is actually ok as far as mechanics go. There are a few errors here and there, but nothing major.

For this piece, it looks like the author tried to do a stream of consciousness and then just literally did that without a filter or an edit.

 

Totally agree with what people said above.

To all the authors on this site looking for tips...BE GENEROUS WITH YOUR PARAGRAPHS!

Because of you wide a ff.net page is, it is absolutely ridiculous to try and read a long paragraph. It can suck the life out of your story and the motivation from your readers.

 

You can make text on FF more narrow. See example

 

Yeah, this is straight trash.

 

What is that fic?...Even reading that part I can guarantee it's straight up trash. Why would you subject me to such torture @Socialist

 

Yeah, well, don't be so quick to guarantee. That's Odd Ideas by Rorschach's Blot, so your assumptions are kinda shit.

 

Let me drop a nuclear hot take: Rorsach's Blot hasn't been funny for more than a decade, if he ever was in the first place. It is just as shit as it comes across.

 

I'm going to have to disagree with most of the people in this thread, I feel.

True, the story suffers from many issues - the authors somewhat shaky grasp on the English language, the lack of proper formatting, etc. etc., as pointed out above - and that may be reason enough to rate it as trash and move on. After all, if an author doesn't even bother polishing his writing enough to make it at least somewhat readable, the story itself can't be all that good, can it?

Arguably it isn't, at least from a technical point of view. And yet, there is something about it that drew me in, and - once I was able to look past its problems - I must say that I thoroughly enjoyed reading this fic. It's very far from perfect, but it was entertaining, and isn't that, at the end of the day, the one thing that matters?

I've heard it said that an idea is worthless, unless you use it. I'd rather people continue publishing stories like this one - flawed, but worth reading nevertheless - instead of not realizing their ideas at all.

 

Yeah the dialogue gets quite annoying but it's not terrible by itself. Just its format.
That said, this is some weird Alice in Wonderland-type attempt at Inception that completely misses the mark and just doesn't intrigue and excite the reader into believing in it. Opening the story with a mad dash through bizzaro-land and squeaking out increasingly weird exclamations with Luna just isn't a convincing beginning. The imagery isn't vivid enough to really see what's going on most of the time when you want it. And when it is, it's buried in the middle of a (long) paragraph of dialogue with Snape.
It has to be cleaned up a lot in order to be properly read and enjoyed.

 

FYI I discussed with the author and he formatted his story, someone else pm'ed him about it he told me.
Those who have skipped it might want to give it another go, or not.

 

This is pretty bad. The narrative bounces around all over the place incoherently, character voices are all way off, and the description is terrible with peculiar choices of metaphors. There are frequent run-on sentences, possibly arising from the way in which the author seems to be confusing sentences and paragraphs. The author's grasp of grammar is relatively poor, resulting in a slipshod syntax which makes the text unpleasant to read.

The author's note held a bit of a red flag as well. See bold text:

2/5

 

The author was trying for something resembling Inception mixed with a bit of Crack!HP. Basically, the events are occurring in potioned!Harry's dreams.

I think people rightly lambast his technical writing but on the whole, I actually like the concept; too bad the execution was found wanting. I felt he might have been taking a shot at several cliches, not espousing them.

I did have such a hallucinatory experience when I was down with extremely high fever. Maybe the author had such an experience, and tried to tell it through Harry's eyes? If so, he did it almost perfectly.(though he could have done it with better style).

The author lost his readers because of poor sentence/word choices, cliches and obtuse plot.

1.5/5 down to
1/5 on strength of idea alone. Could merit a 2/5 but crack!fics don't cross 2/5 in my book.